@cubano oh, man, your story struck a nerve with me. I did exactly the same thing. A friend and I would ride our bikes to a shopping mall about 5 miles away to hack on commodore 64 and, others up in Hudson's department store. Hudson's use to have a small electronics area where they mostly sold stereo equipment but they had 3-4 tables setup with computers on them. We saved our programs to cassette tapes. I was bitten by the computer bug the summer War Games came out. The local movie theater was auctioning off a commodore 64 so the same friend and I went to the movie theatre every day, took home a stack of contest entry forms, filled them out, went back and stuffed them in the box. Never won anything. It was probably another year before my paper route gave me the $300 I needed to buy my first computer.

As I read this post I thought the same thing as you; how fascinating it was to see the actual code that ran many of my programs.

In my time, I got into BBS software and assembler and I find myself copying the BASIC Emulator out of ROM and studying it.

anyway, it's just so cool to read posts by so many people that thought the same way.